A contact's identification on services such as Skype and Xbox Live often consists of metadata like a username, gamertag, nickname, first name, surname, or combinations thereof. Some user communities actually encourage a degree of “digital anonymity” in contact names, for example the moniker “S0meG1rl” is intended to be pronounced as “Some Girl”, but is unpronounceable if read literally. This presents a challenge for software attempting to use speech recognition to easily identify a contact without a high degree of (tangential) user interaction.
Communication systems attempt to address this by doing one (or more) of the following: force users to enter additional pronounceable metadata; ignore difficult looking names or do nothing so that names entered as, for example, “Chr1s” are simply not useable in voice recognized commands.